A Marxist reply to a moral abstraction

The trolley problem presents itself as an individual moral calculus: sacrifice one life to save many. From the standpoint of the bourgeois moralists who invent such dilemmas, ethics is an abstract arithmetic detached from social relations. Marxism insists otherwise: moral questions are rooted in material conditions and class struggle. As Leon Trotsky insisted, “the conception of truth and lie was born of social contradictions” and moral formulas divorced from social reality serve the interests of one class or another (“Their Morals and Ours”). So the hypothetical — pull a lever that kills Trotsky but saves “8 billion international proletarians” — must be transformed into a concrete-historical question about agency, the forces that determine outcomes, and the role of leadership and program in class struggle.

Individuals and the social forces that make history

Marxism speaks in terms of classes and social forces, not saints and utilitarian calculators. Individuals matter, but their significance can only be judged in relation to their place in the class struggle and the objective balance of forces. Trotsky was not merely a private individual: he was a leading theorist and organizer whose work—especially the theory of Permanent Revolution and the continuity of the Fourth International—remains a strategic weapon for the proletariat (see Trotsky on Permanent Revolution and internationalism). To imagine that the survival of the international working class turns on the physical life of one person is to accept an idealist notion of history. In reality, the fate of the proletariat is determined by economic crises, class relations, organizational strength, and the political education of the masses.

Trotsky himself warned repeatedly against moral abstractions and the pacifying illusions of petty‑bourgeois ethics; he connected the moral to the political and insisted that methods must be judged by their compatibility with revolutionary interests (“Their Morals and Ours”). The correct Marxist response to the scenario is to expose its premises: it transforms a political problem—how to mobilize and arm the international working class—into a private moral choice between two lives.

The logic of means and ends: revolutionary method, not sightless arithmetic

If one accepts the purely utilitarian framing (one life vs many), a Marxist still must ask: what actually produces the survival and emancipation of the proletariat? It is not the elimination of bourgeois or counterrevolutionary individuals in isolation; it is the development of mass consciousness, the forging of an independent revolutionary organization, and the international mobilization of the working class. Trotsky’s central theoretical insistence—that socialism cannot be built in one country and that world revolution is the only secure basis of socialism (“Program of International Revolution”)—points directly to the indispensable role of international organization and strategy. Killing one leader does not substitute for the building of such organizations.

Furthermore, a policy of instrumental killing treats politics as technocratic engineering and mirrors the methods of the counterrevolution Trotsky combated. As he wrote, bourgeois and petty‑bourgeois moralists often collapse into justifying reactionary means while naming them noble ends; Marxism rejects that deceit. Revolutionary ethics demands methods consistent with the emancipation of the working class, not the adoption of the logic of the executioner (“Their Morals and Ours”).

Concrete answer: do not pull the lever — transform the struggle

Given Marxist premises, the answer is no: one should not pull the lever. The hypothetical presumes salvific magic in the elimination of a single revolutionary leader. In material reality the bourgeoisie and the counterrevolution reproduce themselves through social relations; the proletariat’s liberation is the product of collective political struggle. Trotsky’s life and work embodied a continuity of program and tendency—the Fourth International—that provides the proletariat with strategic perspective and leadership. To murder that continuity to “save” the proletariat is a nonsense of idealism; the real lever to be pulled is the organization of the international working class into independent political and industrial organizations capable of seizing power.

In short: the problem as posed misidentifies the causal mechanism of historical change. The proper revolutionary response is not a private act of sacrifice or selective murder but the implacable building of class independence, international organization, and a revolutionary program—the very tasks Trotsky devoted his life to and whose defense remains central to the Fourth International tradition (see Trotsky’s final-year struggle and its relevance).

Political conclusion

The trolley thought‑experiment reduces politics to an ethico-mathematical trick. A Marxist reply restores the question to its social content: the emancipation of humanity requires collective organization and the conquest of state power through the conscious action of the international proletariat. No moral calculus that treats leadership as a disposable variable can substitute for that programmatic and organizational necessity.